Today the New York Times published an editorial admitting that it's coverage of Iraq and WMD's during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq was flawed. In their own words:
We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged--or failed to emerge.
The Times prefaces this statement by first explaining how the majority of their war leadup reporting was accurate and that, in re-examining their coverage they "found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of."
In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information.
The Times also has posted on their site a sampling of articles they published about the decisions that led the United States into the war in Iraq, and especially the issue of Iraq's weapons. This sampling has fifteen articles that seem to be hyping Iraq's WMD capabilities, of these, nine were written by Judith Miller. Judith Miller's reporting has been extensively reviewed and commented on in the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, Slate, and Counterpunch. The Times editorial mentions no journalists by name and deflects the issue of Judith Miller's irresponsible reporting by saying:
Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated.
The most enlightening aspect of today's Times editorial is not it's content, which is as much a justification as an apology, but rather the timing of it. In its explanation of how it got duped into publishing faulty information, the Times squarely places the blame on Ahmad Chalabi and the INC. It is telling that while Chalabi has been discredited as a viable source of intelligence for months, the Times has not been willing to admit this until the same week that Chalabi has officially fallen out of favor with the Bush administration. It would seem that the New York Times has found a convenient scapegoat in the newly discredited Chalabi to excuse their culpability in selling the Iraq war to the American public.
